Electronic entities having a presence in an electronic environment, such as may be provided via a Web site or other such source of content, take advantage of the full capabilities of modern Web-based services to deliver a compelling user experience. For example, items offered for sale on a Web site may be divided by categories, prices, types, and other identifiers. A user may search for item(s) of interest using a search service associated with the Web site. Search results for an item may include a list of items including, for each item, price, description, images, availability and other types of data associated with the item. Once initial search results are received, a user may make further search refinements by searching for an item within a particular category (e.g., searching for a TV set under “Electronics” category), using particular search criteria (e.g., price range) or otherwise refining his or her search. Normally, different types of data associated with an item are stored in one or more data stores on the “back end” of computer systems providing services associated with a Web site. Thus, every time a search is being conducted, data associated with the items to be returned by a search service is collected from different data sources that have different capacities, response times, and other characteristics. In practice, then, an enormous amount of data gets collected, assembled, and delivered for display to a user when a search is done.
If a user decides to conduct a further search for the item by narrowing the search criteria, at least some results from the previous search will be returned in the narrowed search results. However, as in the original search, the data for the same search results would again have to be retrieved from the data sources, assembled, and delivered to the user. Thus, even if the search results for the refined search substantially overlap with the previous search results, the data for the overlapped results is collected the same way as the data for new results that were not present in the previous search results. Accordingly, additional time, effort, and resources are spent for any additional search for the item requested by a user.